Island writing, Creole cultures

myth of island isolation, foregrounding how accessibility by sea ensures that island spaces have experienced complex patterns of migration, diaspora, 'exisle' and settlement. In fact, the sea is a vital component of island identity and has 25 contributed to the formation of a complex maritime imagination in historical, Island writing, Creole cultures literary and cultural production. Moreover, far from being isolated, most islands are part of archipelagoes and have simultaneous national and regional alliances. ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY As a series of small nations (or colonial territories) connected by the sea, islands are often constituted by the activity of regional bodies of water such as tl1e Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Oceans, allowing for more fluid, transcultural and multilingual relationships than those associated with the terrestrial borders of Is it possible to speak of island literatures in global, comparative terms? Are the nation state. Writing about the Caribbean, Martiniquan writer Edouard geography and colonial history both so influential that we can say that they Glissant explains 'each island embodies openness. The dialectic between inside have produced an identifiable body of postcolonial island literatures? This and outside is reflected in the relationship ofland and sea. It is only those who chapter explores methodologies for comparing island writing by turning to are tied to the European continent who see insularity as confining.'2 Building contemporary literatUre in English from the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific upon Glissant and others, Chris Bongie has argued: archipelagoes, foregrounding the important contributions made by island the island is a figure that can and must be read in more than one way: on the one writers to postcolonial discourse and literature. Although one might arguably hand, as the absolutely particular, a space complete unto itself and thus an ideal define every land mass on the globe as an island, this chapter focuses on the metaphor for a traditionally conceived, unified and unitary, identity; on the literary production of former European colonies in the global south, partic­ other, as a fragment, a part of some greater whole from which it is in exile and ularly tropical islands with plantation, diaspora and creolization histories, as to which it must be related - in an act of (never completed) completion that is well as indigenous literatures in white settler nations. 1 Although the concerns always also, as it were, an ex-isle, a loss of the particular. The island is thus the explored here are not restricted to island contexts, this chapter suggests that site of a double identity - dosed and open.3 the collusion of geography and history has made these particular issues more prevalent in contemporary island writing than in other bodies of postcolonial St Lucian poet Derek Walcott explains that this tension between land and literature. sea is vital to the spatial scale ofthe island imagination. 'There is a strength that Colonial narratives and the tourist industry have long depicted island space is drawn from island peoples in that reality ofscale il1!::which they inhabit. There as remote, isolated and peripheral to modernity. Yet island writers have dem­ is a sense both of infinity and acceptance of the possibility of infinity ... It onstrated the ways in which centuries of transoceanic diaspora and settlement provides a kind of settling of the mind that is equal to the level of the have rendered island spaces as vital and dynamic loci of cultural and material horizon.'4 For island writers, turning to the infinity of the oceanic imaginary exchange. Contrary to the assumption that the privileged sites of history and provides an alternative model of space and time, a 'tidalectic' between past modernity are continental (or generated from the British archipelago), many and present, land and sea, the local and the global. A term coined by scholars have demonstrated that tropical islands and peoples were integral Barbadian poet-historian Kamau Brathwaite, 'tidalectics' draws upon 'the to the development of anthropology, botany, environmentalism, plantation movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic ... capitalism, nuclear weapons and even the English novel. From the early motion, rather than linear'5 and provides a dynamic methodology for British texts of island colonialism, such as William Shakespeare's The Tempest approaching island literatures. In an effort to destabilize colonial myths of (1610-11) and Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of island isolation and linear models of progress, this chapter adopts Robinson Crusoe (1719), the island has provided the material, ideological and Brathwaite's tidalectics as a method for examining the relationship between imaginative space for forging new social relations and literary genres. Island land and sea, diaspora and indigeneity, and· arrival and settlement in island writers have turned to this complex history in order to reshape the colonial literatures.

802 803 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures

This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section examines influential colonial literary models of island space such as The Tempest Colonial models and and how these texts set a precedent for discussions Robinson Crusoe While the etymology of the term cisland' simply means land surrounded by about cultural and colonial entanglement in island literatures in English. water, the popular understanding of this space is ofa timeless, tropical, cdesert' Importantly, the patriarchal colonial power relations between Shakespeare's island often associated with abundant flora, fauna and sunny beaches posi­ Prospero and Caliban as well as Defoe's Crusoe and Friday have been reconfig­ tioned outside the ambit of global history. In fact, in contemporary tourist ured by many island writers and interrogated in terms of their literary patrilin­ discourse, the traveller generally leaves the industrialized urban north, a space eage. This section foregrounds the question ofgenealogical and racial origins, an understood to be the locus ofhistory-making, to escape to a tropical island that important concern in island writing, by turning to works by George Lamming is alluring precisely because it is positioned outside the progressive historical (Barbados), Dev Virahsawmy (Mauritius) and Keri Hulme (Aotearoa/New 6 pace of modern time. Yet the discursive construction of the island as an Zealand). The second section turns to Derek Walcott's assertion that Cthe sea especially isolated and remote space is a consequence of European colonialism is history' and foregrounds the transoceanic imaginary in island writers, posi­ and has been naturalized by the popular castaway narrative which upholds an tioning the trope of colonial arrival by sea and its subsequent cross-cultural accidenta1 model of colonial invasion.? Over the centuries of European expan­ entanglements as vital elements of the history of island writing and its post­ sion into the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific archipelagoes, the island became colonial revisions. Writers explored here include Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/ represented - paradoxically - as increasingly distant in time and space from a US), Epeli Hau'ofa (Tonga/Fiji), Witi Ihimaera (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and presumably modern and civilized Western metro pole. Even as the forces of Khal Torabully (Mauritius). Although the maritime imaginary encompasses colonialism, slavery, anthropology, tourism and diaspora altered island com­ diverse experiences, ranging from middle-passage crossings in slave and munities and landscapes, the tropical island was increasingly rendered as indenture ships to indigenous voyaging across the Pacific, the writerly inaccessible, a space only visited through remarkable circumstances such as engagement with the transoceanic provides a vital trope to explore narra­ shipwreck or capture by pirates. Yet this has been challenged by scholars in a tives of cultural and ontological origin. The third section shifts from the variety ofdisciplines. Focusing on what he terms Cgreen imperialism', historian focus on maritime diaspora to narratives of the land, indigeneity and Richard Grove has shown how tropical islands across the globe were vital to national belonging, touching on the works of Sam Selvon (Trinidad), the development of human and botanical transplantation, as well as theories Merle Collins (Grenada) and Patricia Grace (Aotearoa/New Zealand). of evolution and environmental resource conservation. In anthropology, While the transoceanic imaginary provides an important way to think Fernando Ortiz and Sidney Mintz have demoQStrated how African and through histories of diaspora and contemporary- outmigration patterns in European relations in the Caribbean plantation syst~m resulted in the complex the wake of globalization, the focus on local and terrestrial concerns allows social process of transculturation and creolization.. Literary scholar Diana for a closer scrutiny of issues such as indigenous sovereignty and its relation­ Loxley has demonstrated the ways in which the muscular Christianity of ship to the settler state, postcolonial nation building, local resource develop­ nineteenth-century British fiction was constituted through boys' adventure ment, and the relational virtues of small islandness which prioritize local novels about colonized islands across the globe. Writing about the Pacific, communities and genealogies. The final section turns to postcolonial island archaeologist Patrick Kirsch and historian Greg Dening have both criticized texts concerned with a creolizing ctidalectic' between land and sea through the general neglect ofislands in the rendering ofglobal history, and shown how tropic figures of the contact zone such as the beach and the plantation. vital islands and their residents have been to staging the history of European Overall this chapter foregrounds the creative ways .in which postcolonial expansion as well as theories of human and cultural difference. From different island writers have utilized their unique geographic surroundings to explore vantage points, these scholars have established that island communities - often the relationship between roots and routes, to theorize local concerns of unwillingly - have provided the knowledge, labour and space for European sovereignty in the wake of globalization as well as to demonstrate historical laboratories and the development of global modernity. 8 connections across space to other island archipelagoes with similar colonial From Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Johann David Wyss's Swiss Family histories. Robinson (Der Schweizerische Robinson, 1812), European texts have depicted

80 4 805 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures

islands as remote spaces to ponder philosophical origins, renovate social with the material realities of colonial expansion. Mter hundreds of structures, address cultural and biological difference, and to explore and Robinsonades, this island tabula rasa accrued a layered textuality, becoming experiment with the relationship between humans and the natural envi­ 'the site of a radical rehearsal of words already spoken, a rewriting of books ronment. Kevin Carpenter's research has shown that between 1788 and alreadywritten'.13 Importantly, this textuality is specifically gendered. Popular 1910, over 500 desert-island stories were published in England alone.9 colonial texts from J. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) to Jules Verne's These Robinsonades, or island solitude and adventure stories so popular in The Mysterious Island (1874) inscribe 'science, technology, empire and explora­ Western Europe, may have been inspired by Robinson Crusoe, but the genre's tion [as] indissolubly anchored to masculinity', a gendered mobility that is often origins extend to the East. Ibn Tufail's twelfth-century text Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, projected upon a passive, feminized island space.14 In the popular boys' island a philosophical treatise from Islamic Spain on precisely these representations· adventure novel of the nineteenth century, the island provides for the fantasy of island isolation, origins, and the trope of the castaway and his native of autogenesis in which men produce boys through the dissemination of servant, became a vital influence after its late seventeenth-century translation technology, the English language and Christian education.15 from Arabic into Latin and English. This text was an important influence on 10 Although this colonial island fantasy produced many parodies and critiques Daniel Defoe and, by extension, centuries of Robinsonades to follow. from within the colonial metropole,16 the first generation of postcolonial Importantly, Ibn Tufail's novel (a revision of an earlier Persian work) island writers who h.ave 'written back' to the English canon have, generally expanded the concept of tabula rasa or 'blank slate' through the motif of speaking, focused on questions of textual inheritance through the metaphors . the isolated castaway who recreates social, material and philosophical rela­ of patrilineage and exile. Drawing on both The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe, tions on an isolated island. This concept of tabula rasa was adopted by John French sociologist Octave Mannoni offered a psychoanalytic model ofcolonial Locke, who emphasized the self-authoring of human subjectivity.11 I suspect parent/child relations in Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization that this concept of the 'blank slate' for human imprinting - which provided (1950). Although they took issue with Mannoni's model, it was influential to the epistemological space for the debate between nature and nurture - was Martiniquan writers Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire, who offered more mat­ deeply tied to the construction of the island as empty space, terra nullius, in erialist critiques of the patrilineal model of colonialism.17 This question of which one might imprint imported desires. Moreover, the shift from the succession and inheritance has been vital to both colonial and postcolonial philosophical concept of tabula rasa to the denial of sovereignty associated literary discourse. Edward Said has demonstrated a shift from filiative to with the colonial construction of terra nullius (an erasure of indigenous affiliative relationships in Western art since the era of modernism. He explains presence by declaring empty lands for European control) had obvious polit­ that in this break with tradition, 'natural' and fam~ial bonds are ruptured and ical consequences. substituted by more heterogeneous affiliations di:at are 'transpersonal', pro­ 18 From a colonial perspective, the boundedness of islands provided an ideal fessional and class conscious. Building upon Said, John Thieme traces a laboratory for social and biological experimentation: a panopticon, a contained similar shift away from colonial filiation to affiliation in postcolonial revisions society, terra nullius, a figure for the ship and the world in miniature. The ofcanonical texts. He explains, 'problematic parentage becomes a major trope colonial model of the deserted island suspends history in a bounded, controlled in postcolonial con-texts, where the genealogical bloodlines of transmission space in which to render its narration possible. In The Tempest and its rewrites, are frequently delegitimised by multiple ancestral legacies ... Orphans and the island provides a space to address issues of political and biological repro­ bastards abound in postcolonial texts and the engagement with issues of duction as well as literary succession. Yet the discourses of reproduction and parentage is often ... intense.'19 succession are fraught with erasures. Loxley has shown that colonial-era The patriarchal parent/child model of island colonization. has become a authors grafted imported ideologies, technologies and histories onto the island vital point of interrogation for postcolonial writers, many of whom have (such as Crusoe's handy cache of shipwreck supplies) rather than acknowl­ revised Shakespeare's depiction of Prospero and Caliban with particular atten­ edging indigenous presence, thus circumventing the thorny issue of native tion to the question oflanguage and representation. Caliban's famous retort to sovereignty.12 Ultimately colonial writers imagined the island as a European Prospero and Miranda, 'you taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I world in miniature, a discursive space in which to perform and experiment know how to curse' (I.ii.366-8), has been an important inspiration, particularly

806 807 Island writing, Creole cultures ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY

poignant complaint to Prospero: 'When thou cam'st first / Thou strok'st me in the Caribbean where The Tempest is thought to be set. As Peter Hulme has and made much of me; wouldst give me / in't, and teach me shown, the name Caliban is an anagram for the term cannibal, Columbus's Water with berries 20 how / To name the bigger light' (r.ii.334-7). Lamming depicts Caribbean mistranslation of Carib/Caniba/Caribbean. But if Prospero with all of his migration to postwar England as a legacy of exile that can be traced to books can be seen to represent the power of colonial literacy and language, Prospero's patrilineage. In his essays in Pleasures Exile (1960) he writes: Caliban, as the inheritor of his language and ultimately the island, has been a of primary figure for the postcolonial island writer.21 Caribbean authors as I am a direct descendant ofslaves, too near the actual enterprise to believe that diverse as George Lamming, Aime Cesaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Roberto its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation. Moreover, I am a direct Fernandez Retamar and Derek Walcott have all to some extent reclaimed the descendant of Prospero worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using rebellious character Caliban, emphasizing his exile from land and language, his legacy - not to curse our meeting - but to push it further, reminding the descendants of both sides that what's done is done, and can only be seen as a issues ofsovereignty and independence, and the power embedded in canonical soil from which other gifts, or the same gift endowed with different meanings, 22 narrative traditions. may grow towards a future which is colonised by our acts in this moment, but The boundedness of the island has been translated as omnipotence over which must always remain open.26 space, an assumption nicely epitomized by Prospero's attempts to control the island through the knowledge gleaned by his books and yet simultaneously Like Derek Walcott, who has also explored the patrilineal model of Prospero/ critiqued in Shakespeare's play by Prospero's inability to anticipate Caliban's Caliban and Crusoe/Friday as literary figures of the Caribbean colonial con­ revolt. In an era of decolonization, this tension between social control and dition and the region's production ofart, Lamming suggests these questions of native revolt has been a key element of postcolonial island rewrites. Aime racial and literary inheritance are intertwined. As Walcott's poem 'A Far Cry from Africa' has famously queried, 'I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Cesaire's Une Tempete (1969) for instance stages a debate between Ariel and / Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?'27 Caliban about complicity in the colonial project and the best possible route towards liberation, positioning Ariel's mixed racial heritage as determinative In his depiction of three exiled male artists in England (a painter, composer of his political alliances and associating Caliban, who calls for uhuru, with and actor), Lamming explores but does not limit his engagement with The 23 African epistemologies and 'transcolonial' models ofliberation. This revolu­ Tempest to the racialization of colonial heritage and patriarchal fears of mis­ cegenation, such as Prospero's concern with a union between Cali ban and his tionary potential - and failure - of the colonized subject has been explored in 28 Kamau Brathwaite'S poem 'Caliban', a figure who appears in his trilogy The daughter Miranda. Importandy, Lamming expands the legacy ofcolonial and Arrivants under various forms of colonial and social rule. Reconfiguring artistic inheritance to other figures in the play. IlJPleasures of Exile he analyses Caliban's misdirected pledge of allegiance to the-drunken Stefano - 'Ban' ban' the remarkable textual and physical absence ofMi~anda's mother, questioning Ca-caliban / Has a new master' (n. ii. 178-9) - Brathwaite substitutes the the colonial island trope of masculine ontogenesis. In an effort to explore the Jacobean drama of The Tempest for the liberating political and artistic potential complex gendering of empire, Water with Berries flUs in this absence with the of the region's Carnival celebration, specifically situating it in the recuperative landlady Old Dowager, a reflection of a matrilineal legacy in colonialism that results in profound ambivalence towards the 'mother country,.29 power offolk language and rhythm: 'And / Ban / Ban / Cal- / iban / like to play / pan / at the Car- / nival' .24 In their construction of a modern and creolized Other postcolonial writers have been similarly concerned with how women 30 figure of Cali ban, many of these engagements with The Tempest, as Peter Hulme figure into the genealogy of this ur-text of island colonialism. Jamaican has noted, are less invested in critical readings ofShakespeare's Renaissance play author Michelle Cliff has similarly emphasized the problem of island 'ex-isle' or context than adopting it as an allegorical device to explore the complexity of and called attention to the gendering of the patriarchal model of colonial 25 relations. Her essays have questioned the patrilineage of Prospero/Caliban contemporary postcolonial concerns. postcolonial island writing has often staged the entanglement between and her novels have highlighted the agency of characters such as Ariel and islander and arrivant, master and slave, metropole and colony, and their over­ Miranda, Caliban's original language te;acher, particularly in her novel No lapping discourses of physical and cultural 'ex-isle'. The tide of George Telephone to Heaven (1987). In fact, this recuperation of Miranda's white Lamming's novel Water with Berries (1972), for instance, adopts Caliban's Creole identity as a legacy of colonialism can be traced back to Jean Rhys's

80 808 9 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).31 David Dabydeen (Guyana) has contributed to ashore and adopted by indigenous Maori characters named Kerewin and Joe. Lamming's call for an engagement with The Tempest's suppressed matrilineage These colonial island texts travelled with the empire: Robinson Crusoe was one in his cMiranda/Britannia' poems, as well as exploring Miranda's sexual rela­ of the first secular texts to be translated into Maori in 1852. Hulme's vision of tionship with Caliban.3 2 Jamaican scholar Sylvia Wynter has demonstrated the familial relations supports Thieme's observation about postcolonial concerns ways in which The Tempest has staged a colonial hierarchy with Prospero with ancestry and orphanage. Importantly, Hulme's depiction of the island reflecting the epitome of masculine rationalist knowledge, Cali ban as native does not uphold the colonial trope of terra nullius or tabula rasa, and the irrationality, and Miranda's entrance, through the patriarchal exchange of European arrivant does not bring language, technology, rational discourse, marriage, into this courtly model of colonial power. She remarks that the or new social hierarchies as his portmanteau. Instead her novel explores the text occludes the presence of native or racialized women as Can alternative violence in both colonial and familial relations, particularly between adult sexual-erotic model of desire', thereby erasing an indigenous system of bio­ and child, but leaves it to the indigenous characters to excavate their logical and cultural reproduction which would have threatened the expansion precolonial history, which they do - literally - by uncovering a Polynesian of Europe.33 In a similar effort to develop alternative spaces of knowledge voyaging vessel that preserves the island's mauri (spirit). This vessel situates outside patriarchal colonialism, other writers have recuperated the character Maori "as first arrivants and therefore sovereign, as well as agents of a Sycorax, Caliban's African mother and Prospero's greatest perceived threat. complex history of maritime voyaging and technologies that predate Famously, Kamau Brathwaite interprets Sycorax as a historical presence that is Europe. In contrast, the European arrivant is adrift in the oceanic; in his represented in a visual font (Sycorax Video Style), a typeface that allows him to origin story, Cin the beginning, it was darkness, and more fear, and a howling 6 articulate 'dub riddims and nation language and calibanisms' on the page, an wind across the sea'.3 As such, Hulme foregrounds the genealogical inspiring metaphor generative of the suppressed African mother tongue.34 import of indigenous sovereignty embedded in Caliban's declaration that Later generations of island writers have not adhered so closely to 'This island's mine by Sycorax my mother' (I.ii. 333). Shifting the emphasis Shakespeare's original narrative and have transformed the meanings of the to the indigenous or island subject who receives the (silent) European play by emphasizing local island concerns and languages. Dev Virahsawmy's arrivant, these revisionary texts foreground questions of land and sover­ play Tozifann: A Mauritian Fantasy (1991), for instance, is written in Mauritian eignty, and denaturalize the trajectory of European appropriation of island Creole (Morisyen) and integrates multiple Shakespeare texts into the narrative: space. Miranda is substituted by the more forthright cKordelia', and Iago and Polonius enter into the story. (Virahsawmy had already translated MacBeth The sea is histOlJt into Creole.) Importantly Mauritius is one of the few islands on the world .T,ij· that did not have an indigenous population at the time of European contact. Because this body ofliterature is defined by the dynamic interrelation between Accordingly, in terms of cultural origins it is decidedly a Creole that draws land and sea, the transoceanic imagination is a constitutive component of from multiple European, African and Asian cultures, a formulation reflected in island writing. Derek Walcott has famously declared that the Csea is history', characters such as the metisse Kalibann. The problem of Prospero's omnipo­ highlighting the difficulties in inscribing a place which is vast and always in tence over island space is articulated in modern terms ofcomputer surveillance, motion and flux. This model of history demands a different methodology than and the question of patrilineage is substituted by the naturalization of the monumentalizing models of Europe. In his poem cThe Sea is History' Prospero's fears of miscegenation: Kalibann and Kordelia produce a child, Walcott stages a dialogue between the colonials who ask, CWhere are your but as Fran<;oise Lionnet (Mauritius) points out, this emphasis on biological monuments?' and the poet who responds, 'The sea has locked them up.' The reproduction does not necessarily reflect a resolution of the plot.3 5 traditional markers of history are inaccessible and perhaps not even relevant to O!!.estions about patrilineal origins and future descendants have been a the island writer excavating other historiographies in submarine coral and in concern for Pacific writers such as Keri Hulme (Aotearoa/New Zealand), the middle-passage bones at the bottom of the sea. To Walcott, the sea holds whose novel The Bone People (1983) loosely draws from both The Tempest and what Cthe historian cannot hear, the howls / of all the races that crossed the 7 Robinson Crusoe but positions the European as a mute arrivant child, washed water'.3

810 811 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures

Influenced by Walcott and Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant has also used an Caribbean peoples and configures the region as much in flux as the waters oceanic model for African diaspora history, writing in Poetics of Relation that: that surround it. 'The culture of the Caribbean ... is not terrestrial but aquatic ... The Caribbean is the natural and indispensable realm of marine the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the currents, of waves, of folds and double folds, of fluidity and sinuosity.'44 end into the pleasures ofsand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose Water appeals because of its lack of fixity and rootedness; in the words of time is marked by these balls and chains gone green.38 Gaston Bachelard, water is a 'transitory element ... the essential ontological The ocean as origin has been a vital trope to island writers, particularly those metamorphosis between heaven and earth. A being dedicated to water is a who have positioned the contemporary expulsion of 'boat people' in a longer being in flux. '45 Since migration and creolization are characteristic of island historical trajectory that begins with the middle passage. For instance, cultural formations, watery trajectories provide an apt metaphor for ethnicities Edwidge Danticat's short story, 'Children of the Sea' explores the ways in 'in flux', and are vital to imagining human and cultural origins. To Walcott's which the abyss becomes a tautology for Haitians fleeing the ton ton macoutes characters in his epic poem Omeros, 'Mer was both mother and sea', whereas in after President Aristide's (first) expulsion. Caught adrift in the Caribbean with Grace Nichols's (Guyana) poetry, Afro-Caribbean origins are traced back to the 6 other refugees, the unnamed narrator writes back to his girlfriend that: traumatic birth through the 'middle passage womb'.4 Tracing a connection to the past through g~nealogy or filiation, a characteristic trope of postcolonial it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, writing, this model of oceanic origins destabilizes the abstract universal narra­ she has chosen me to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, tive of colonial history and makes a familial claim to time through ancestry, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the rendering memory as history. heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live. 39 Writers from the eastern Pacific Islands have also emphasized the complex Later the narrator comments, 'there are special spots in the sea where lost histories of indigenous voyaging, using these trajectories to configure pat­ Africans who jumped off the slave ships still rest, that those who have died at terns of modern migration and globalization. For instance, Samoan writer sea have been chosen to make that journey in order to be reunited with their Albert Wendt has referred to himself as 'a pelagic fish on permanent migra­ long-lost relations'. 40 Danticat inscribes the ongoing process of transoceanic tion'.47 Anthropologist and novelist Epeli Hau'ofa (Tonga/Fiji) has reconfig­ diaspora for island subjects and responds to Walcott's call to mark the sea as ured the mapping of an isolated Pacific by asserting, 'There is a gulf between history, a space literally inhabited by the bodies of refugees and slaves. viewing the Pacific as "islands in a far sea" and as "a sea of islands". The first Building upon the metaphor offathoming oceanic depth, island writers have emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean far fr9m the centers of power ... also used the breadth of the sea as a trope for -regional unity. Glissant has (which) stress(es) the smallness and remoteness;"'~f the islands. The second is a utilized the sea as a model of regional history. Inspired by Brathwaite's dictum more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their that Caribbean 'unity is submarine', Glissant determines the islands are con­ relationships.'48 Hau'ofa reorients land-based bias towards the complex pro­ nected by 'submarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in cesses of interculturation generated by transoceanic movement. Inspired by some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its Walcott's sentiment that 'the sea is history', Hau'ofa concludes that 'our networks and branches'.41 He works against the model of the isolated island roots, our origins are embedded in the sea', which is 'our pathway to each by turning to Caribbean migration - originating with the earliest migrants other'.49 such as Carib and Arawak - in determining that the regional sea 'extend(s) in Pacific writers such as Hau'ofa, Wendt, Sir Tom Davis (the former prime all directions ... a sea that explodes the sc~ttered lands into an arc. A sea that minister of the Cook Islands), Robert Sulliv~n (Aotearoa/New Zealand), diffracts. '42 Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard (Samoa/US) and Teresia Teaiwa (Fiji) have all This focus on watery trajectories is a hallmark of island writing. Cuban emphasized the transoceanic history of indigenous migration across the . writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo has also developed an aquapoetic vision of the region, establishing a larger familial relationship between islanders in which region, asserting that the Caribbean is a 'meta-archipelago' with the 'virtue of Tahitians, Maori, Hawaiians and others in the eastern Pacific refer to each having neither a boundary nor a centre' .43 He highlights the dispersal of other as Polynesian kin .. 50 While one may not expect indigenous Pacific poetry

812 813 Island writing, Creole cultures ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Indian diaspora writers such as J. S. Kanwal and Satendra Nandan, both to reflect the same concern with transoceanic diaspora, Samoan writer Albert from Fiji, have written historical novels and poetry that reinscribe the crossing Wendt writes in his poem, 'Inside Us the Dead': of kalapani, or black waters, to the islands of indenture, drawing from my polynesian fathers both historical accounts of the ginn it, or labour contract, and Mrican middle­ who escaped the sun's wars, seeking passage narratives.59 Nandan, using the historical crossing as a metaphor of the these islands by prophetic stars, second diaspora of Indo-Fijians after the 1987 coup, writes of'Kalapani, black emerged waters, a cross across the seven seas / With blood, betrayal, grief that never from the sea's eye like turdes 51 cease.,60 This body of Indian diaspora literature often demarcates a difference scutding to beach their eggs. between a genealogical and historical relationship to the sea. Indo-Fijian writer Maori author Witi Ihimaera's work has also been deeply informed by the Subramani's novella 'Gone Bush' begins, 'In the beginning was the sea- history of transoceanic migration. In The Whale Rider (1987) the prologue everything came out of the sea ... from it came the goddess of life.' Although begins with a lyrical description of Kahu, a Maori ancestor who rode a whale the Indian protagonist 'seemed ... [like] someone sent to a landlocked culture from Hawaiki, 'the land of the Ancients' to Aotearoa to settle his community. whose people were riders ofhorses',61 like Walcott's narrator, the process of This migration is naturalized, for when the island is sighted, 'the land and sea migration to th~ islands has realigned this character's relationship towards the sighed with gladness: We have been Jound ... Our blessing will soon come.'52 sea in a way that foregrounds the historical process. As all arrivants before the Generations later his young namesake saves the same bullwhale and compan­ twentieth century came to islands by boat and have configured new relation­ ions from expiring on the shore, foregrounding an ancient human/whale ships to the sea through island living, Hau'ofa argues that 'all of us in Oceania relationship and the role of environmental guardianship, as well as invoking today, whether indigenous or otherwise, can truly assert that the sea is our human evolutionary origins in the sea. Ihimaera's vision of the boundless common heritage'. 62 horizon echoes Walcott's observations of the global scope of island ness as Often travelling in refitted slave ships, Indian indenturers from Mauritius, the former inscribes the 'huge seamless marine continent which we call Te Trinidad and other island regions have inspired an important new body of Moana Nui a Kiwa, the Great Ocean ofKiwa'.53 literature in which island identity is articulated in global terms. Like most While Ihimaera expands our vision of transoceanic migration by inscribing maritime narratives of the middle passage or of transoceanic voyaging, the non-human travellers, other writers have broadened the gendered parameters transoceanic imaginary has been traditionally imagined in terms of a shipload of Pacific literary production about migration. 54 Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa's of male travellers orjahaji bhai.63 Like the i~land, the ship is represented as a poetry collection Searching Jar Nei Nim"'anoa.(1999) calls upon 'one of only a world but a peculiarly homoso~ial one. In g~..fieral these narratives construct a few female figures in the male-dominated field of Pacific Island navigational 55 maritime fraternity where women are absent from the public space of migra­ traditions' as she moves between the Gilbertese, Fijian and Hawaiian islands. tion yet the feminine symbolic is apparent in representations of a fluid, Albert Wendt's novel Ola also foregrounds Pacific women travellers, depicting maternal sea and a feminized, receptive land. Novels such as Ramabai his protagonist Ola's subjectivity as constituted by her relationship to the sea. Espinet's (Trinidad) The Swinging Bridge (2003) have done much to recuperate Through the vehicle of water Ola comes into her subjecthood at the age of six; the history of women in the diaspora, imagining transoceanic origins in terms seeing her reflection in the ocean she observes, 'Yes, it was me, I existed, I am, I of personal genealogy.64 Mahadai Das's (Trinidad) poem 'They Came in Ships' am separate. I was myself.'56 Years later at the New Zealand shore she 'felt at (1977) inscribes a detailed historical trajectory of the crossing of kalapani as home, remembering: the sea which cups my islands, washes each night through cultural memory, in which the omniscient narrator translates oral to written: my dreams, no matter what shore I reach'.57 As a pelagic text, Ola privileges 'At the horizon's edge I hear / Voices crying in the wind. ,65 Like middle­ water as constitutive to island identity: passage narratives, these literatures inscribe the sea in terms of containment and terror as well as the creolizing possibilities of new social and cultural We are sixty-five percent water ... Our brains are eighty per cent water. We are more water than blood. So our water ties to one another are more impor­ relations. Moreover, these inscriptions often engage corporeal images of the 58 tant than our blood ties! We carry within us the seas out of which we came. crossing, exploring how both the body and identity are reconfigured through

815 814 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures the migration process in the poetry ofLelawattee Manoo-Rahming (Trinidad) wanted out, wanted to tell itself, is one of islandne~s and its transformation 1 and in the work of Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi and Natacha Appanah- into I-landness.'7 Amidst a global geopolitics that prioritizes size, might, military and technological power, the I-land voice is often cartographically Mouriquand.66 In historicizing transoceanic migration for nineteenth-century Indian diminished to the supposed insignificance of its very landscape. Drawing indenturers (derogatorily called 'coolies'), some authors such as David attention to local island subjectivities and cultural production, and shifting Dabydeen (Guyana) have reclaimed epic narrative to articulate the experience away from definitions ofthe island as a 'piece of real estate', Philip's concept of of the subaltern in terms ofa 'coolie odyssey'.67 More recently Khal Torabully the 'I-land' recentres island geography as crucial to historical analysis. The (Mauritius) has reclaimed the term and refashioned it into a theory of 'cool­ I -land can be defined alternately as 'a piece of land surrounded by seas of 2 itude' which is deeply tied to the transoceanic imaginary. He explains, 'It is colonialism. Or, perhaps, afloat in its own history. '7 impossible to understand the essence of "coolitude" without charting the This attempt to map a local geography can also be seen in Sam Selvon's· coolies' voyage across the seas. That decisive experience, that coolie odyssey, (Trinidad) early novel, An Island Is a World (1955). Like Earl Lovelace's later left an indelible stamp on the imaginary landscape of coolitude.,68 Moreover, work Salt (1996) - in which the title refers to a substance whose ingestion 'Coolitude explores the concept ofthe ocean as a nodal moment of migration, a makes it impossible to 'fly back to Mrica' in popular folk narrative - Selvon's space for destruction of identity, yet also one of regeneration, when an aes­ novel seeks to natu,ralize national belonging, resisting the tug of exile and thetics of migration was created.,69 These narratives have been crucial to migration?3 His protagonist Foster despairs over his lack ofidentification with offering an alternative site of island historiography, destabilizing the myth of his repatriating Indian family and his inability to feel a sense ofnational roots in island isolation, and offering new genealogical models of oceanic origin across his (still colonial) Trinidad. He despairs: 'of what material loss would it be to the world if the island suddenly sank under the sea?'74 Foster senses that in this time and space. world which entirely 'consisted of the continents',75 the disappearance of a small island like Trinidad would not alter political.cartographies. Mapping the I -land Naipaul's infamous lament that 'Trinidad was too unimportant and we . The past decade or more of postcolonial scholarship has emphasized the could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which 6 trajectories of diaspora in ways that are often gendered masculine and by was, as evelyone said, only a dot on the map of the world'7 is anticipated in focusing on migrancy has often deflected attention from ongoing struggles Selvon's novel (published seven years earlier), which begins with a remarkably for decolonization and indigenous sovereignty. Glissant has warned about similar image: facile celebrations of migrancy and has argued for a return to local island The world spun in (Foster's) brain, and he imagined the island of concerns: 'when one rediscovers one's landscape, desire for the other country Trinidad ... He saw it on the globe, with the Americas sprawled like giant ceases to be a form of alienation'?O If we adopt Brathwaite's tidalectics, shadows above and below, and the endless Atlantic lapping the coastlines ofthe facilitating a dialogue between land and sea, our scrutiny of island writing continents and the green islands ofthe Caribbean ... Foster imagined Trinidad will not privilege routes over roots, and we will uncover localized island as it was, a mere dot on the globe.77 concerns that may not necessarily speak to cosmopolitan discourses of exile. Here Selvon demonstrates how the 'I-land' voice is reduced to the presumed This section on the 'I-land' discusses texts which are concerned with irrelevance of its landscape; small size becomes a metonymy for the lack of reterritorializing and naturalizing the subject's relationship to the land in the history, anticipating Naipaul's sentiment that 'history is built around achieve­ wake of colonial alienation and exile. Thus a refusal to migrate from the ment and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies ... There were island may reflect a resistance to colonial trajectories rather than a lack of only plantations, prosperity, decline, neglect: the size of the islands called for cosmopolitanism. 8 -'7 In his poem 'Homage to Gregorias' Walcott's narrator parodies In her essay, 'A piece of land surrounded', Marlene NourbeSe Philip nothing else. Naipaul, lamenting, 'there was no history. No memory / Rocks haunted by (Tobago) calls attention to how island history has been recorded by outsiders seabirds, that was a1L'79 This tension about representing small island concerns without the presence of the 'I-lander'. She writes, 'For me, the "story" that

816 817 Island writing, Creole cultures ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY with colonial technologies and discourses is apparent in Hau'ofa's short Merle Collins's (Grenada) novel The Colour of Forgetting (1995) engages story cBlessed are the Meek', which describes a resident of the fictional island specifically with these questions of small islandness and how to articulate the cI-lander' in a way that values local cultural production. The concern with local ofTiko as: landscape is of historical importance because, as Glissant explains, the violence A citizen ofa tiny country, so small that mankind is advised not to look for it on of the Caribbean plantocracy has prevented Cnature and culture' from forming a classroom globe for it will only search in vain. More often than not cartog­ Ca dialectical whole that informs a people's consciousness'. 85 As Michelle Cliff raphers leave Tiko out of their charts altogether because they can't be bothered asks, CWhen our landscape is so tampered with, how do we locate ourselves?,86 looking for a dot sufficiently small to represent it faithfully and at the same 8o Reconfiguring cI-land' discourse is thus possible through what Glissant terms time big enough to be seen without the aid ofa microscope. Cthe language oflandscape,.87 Collins's novel animates indigenous history and Hau'ofa's quote lis a parody of a nineteenth-century missionary text that the landscape through her character Carib, the presence of tree spirits, the reported that the Fijian is said to clook with pleasure on a globe, as a repre­ ghosts of slaves, a whispering mountain and speaking animals, depicting a sentation of the world, until directed to contrast Fiji with Asia or America, dynamic exchange between a deeply historical landscape of flora and fauna when his joy ceases, and he acknowledges, with a forced smile, CCour land is not and its human residents, whose labour has reconfigured both the geography larger than the dung of a fly"; but, on rejoining his comrades, he pronounces and botany of islal?-d space. A conflict arises between the older generation who the globe a CClying ball",.81 work on the land, those who cknow red mud', and the urbanized youth whose Here Cgeography serv(es) as a metaphor for history - as well it might in vision ofsocial revolution dismisses small land holding as cuneconomic'. As one islands whose history has been so deeply influenced by geographical factors'. 82 of the novel's elders exclaims, clfyou think a two acres here (are) uneconomic, It is in this way that narrative, cartography and colonial history are shown in then you have somebody in another bigger country thinking the whole of (our shifting relation to each other and highlighted as central to the process of island) . .. uneconomic because it so small ;. . so you do away with me and my historical excavation. Louise Bennett (Jamaica) has drawn attention to - and land and they do away with you. ,88 After centuries of mono crop plantation gently mocked - the important nationalist remapping of island spaces in an labour, island writers and residents are rethinking sustainable land use in ways island tongue. In her poem cIndependance' she writes: that uphold a mutually constitutive relation between nature and culture. Like Selvon and Lovelace, Collins resists the valorizing discourse of ex-isle and She hope dem caution worl'-map inscribes the tremendous pressures upon island attempts to build a sustainable, Fe stop draw Jamaica small self-governing community. After the novel's conflict results in violence (the US For de lickle speck can't show invasion of Grenada), it concludes by sugg4ting - but not depicting - a We Independantniss at all. potential new pathway forged by the next generation of women leaders, a Morsomever we must tell map dat cautious hope for a (re)productive future. We don't like we position - Island writers in the Pacific have been deeply concerned with questions of Please kindly teck we out a sea sovereignty, especially in the wake of neo-colonial development schemes and And draw we in de Ocean.83 global tourism. Solomon Islands' writer Celo Kulagoe writes of this csecond By anthropomorphizing cworl'-map', Bennett calls attention to cartogra­ wave' ofimperialism in his dual poem, CWhite-Land', the first version written phy's subjective rather than purely scientific production and the ways that in pidgin (pijin), the second in cstandard' English: colonial mapping marginalizes island spaces. These lines also foreground the Compatriot, ways in which independence movements metaphorically (and sometimes You see that white-man coming? .... literally) enlarge CI -land' cartographies. If Can island is a world, and every­ He was here before too ... where that people live, they create their own worlds', 84 then the island He is here again might-be reclaimed as a space of belonging rather than marginalization and to help you, help you in selling your exile.

818 819 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures

land, extinction, to Jacques Roumain's (Haiti) Masters of the Dew (1977), about in selling your beach ... deforestation, water scarcity and its impact on the labouring peasant class, when WHITE-LAND island writers have long been engaged with the relationship between the text, is well-established 91 where will you be?89 the people and the land. Like Edouard Glissant, who has argued that the Caribbean island 'landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be In this poem, 'He is here again' invokes a long history of colonialism in the traced on the underside. It is all history', his compatriot Daniel Maximin has Pacific articulated in terms of ancestry, for this figur~ of capitalist appropria­ argued that the land is 'a character in our history'.92 Caribbean writers such as tion who is named 'white-land' appeared 'during our grandfather's days, / and Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire and again during our father's times'. Highlighting the trajectory between state­ many others have turned to local flora as a way to explore the entangled history facilitated imperialism of the nineteenth century and the forms of global of ' green imperialism', colonial botany and island history.93 Similarly, Pacific capitalism that relegate island beaches to pieces of real estate, Kulagoe warns, writers such as Konai Helu Thaman (Tonga) have turned to the history offlora 'keep a good look-out, / for this WHITE-LA~m / also comes / in black skin'. As to excavate colonial history, while Maori author June Mitchell (Aotearoa/New such, 'white-land' becomes an inheritance in terms of colonial patronymy and Zealand) has inscribed the introduction of new plants and peoples to New the reification of genealogical land. Zealand as incorporated (and thereby contained) into a primary cosmological Other writers have addressed this question of'I-land' sovereignty by natural­ genealogy. This is in keeping with Epeli Hau'ofa's call to rethink linear models izing indigenous relationships to the landscape as an effective political and oftime and inscribe what he terms an 'ecological time', a turning to the natural ontological strategy for land claims in white settler nation states. Patricia world which he argues is 'vital to reconstructing our histories'.94 Grace's novel Potiki (1986), for instance, depicts a coastal Maori community's efforts to reclaim ancestral land in the wake of a tourist development scheme CreoIization and tidalectics that draws from previous colonial land confiscations. After refusing the sale of their land to a developer nicknamed 'Dollarman' who wants to build a 'theme In this chapter I've organized postcolonial island literature by history and park', the community experiences a series of attacks on the primary spaces of geography, demonstrating how both land and sea might be understood as community sustainability - the gardens, the cemetery and the meeting house. thematic concerns shared between disparate islands. The final section looks While the characters debate and devise various responses to the attacks, I at the ways in which this long historic dialogue between residents of the land believe Grace's most effective intervention is to offer a narratological response and travellers by sea has contributed to the hist90' of creolization in island that disrupts the linear novel and capitalism's narrative ofprogress through the spaces. Geography and history of course are int2gral to understanding the language of ancestral place. Po tiki has no central narrator or character, reform­ history of creolization, a process that while not limited to island spaces, is ing the individualistic narrative into a communal Maori narration of spiral made all the more likely due to the constraints of island size and perpetual time. Rather than segregating the 'past time' ofthe ancestors from the 'present arrival of new settlers by sea. Yet in this last section I want to emphasize the time' of the contemporary community, Grace employs a spiral temporality limitations of this comparative methodology because while geography con­ where past and future time is narratively re-experienced in a specific space of tributed to the complex racial and cultural settlements in the Pacific, the land, an experience of space and time which she terms the 'now-time, centred history of some of these islands prohibits a description of this process as in the being' .9 0 'creolization'. So when we speak of islands of creolization we are generally Reforging a more sustainable relationship to the land is currently a global thinking ofthe process ofEuropean, Asian and Mrican diaspora and settlement concern, one that is experienced in more urgent terms in island spaces which in the islands ofthe Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. But this is a vexed term in are more vulnerable to rising ocean levels, hurricanes, depleted fish stocks, the Pacific due to the continuity of indigenous communities and languages desertification and resource contamination. From works such as Mayra whose access to land claims is expressed, legally and culturally, through a local Montero's (Cuba) In the Palm of Darkness (1998) about naturalists and species rather than transcultural genealogy. So while discourses of creolization in the Caribbean and the Mascarene Islands may bolster national sovereignty,

820 821 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures these same discourses may weaken nationalist indigenous claims to land in the In his Islands and Beaches (1980), Pacific historian Greg Dening has theor­ Pacific, precisely because they undermine what J. Kehaulani Kauanui refers to ized the beach as a transitional space of crossing, of cultural contact and of 95 as the 'blood logic' of the colonial state. This does not mean that writers deny exchange. It is a space of vulnerability, of translation, of mistranslation, of mixed racial and cultural heritage; in describing his German and Samoan violence and of new friendship. From the footprints discovered by Robinson ancestry, Albert Wendt explains 'I am both indigenous and one of the new­ Crusoe on the shore to the sailors washed up onto Prospero's (or Sycorax's) comers.' Teresia Teaiwa, who is ofMrican American and Banaban descent and island, the beach has long been represented as an ambivalent space of change. 6 grew up in Fiji, describes 'The native (as) hybrid. Hybridity is essential.'9 But Returning to Patricia Grace's novel Potiki we might rightly emphasize the in the larger political and legal arena in which blood is quantified and deter­ ways in which the novel is concerned with Maori land sovereignty, but we minative of access to land, fishing, language, and culture rights, the discourse might also notice how, to this seaside community, the shore plays a vital role, 97 of creolization can be perceived as threatening or irrelevant. signalling moments of radical change such as when the novel's titular char­ At the 2008 MLA conference, Ato O:!!ayson remarked that the process of acter is born in the sea. In June Mitchell's novel Amokura (1978), a text which comparison is necessarily distortive. In other words, in our efforts to trace out is also about a self-sustaining Maori community resisting Pakeha encroach­ connections between texts, we generally ignore those aspects that do not fit ment, Mitchell revisits ancient legends about land birds and seabirds fighting easily into our hermeneutic circle. O:!!ayson called for a mode of comparison for sovereignty on the beach in a way that parallels the tensions between her that is not limited to thematics but rather turns to configuration as a potential nineteenth-century Maori ancestor and her diasporic English husband. In a 98 mode ofcomparison. Thus my final section here does not turn away from the more recent work, James George (Aotearoa/New Zealand) inscribes the vast three previous thematic models (the colonial island canon, the sea as history, militarization ofthe Pacific from the nuclear attacks on Japan and Bikini Atoll and excavating the land) to argue that a separate body of island literatures is to the Vietnam War, but inscribes how this impacts a Maori family by staging concerned with creolization. Instead, I argue here and elsewhere that these are most scenes ofcross-cultural intimacy, revelation and death on the strand ofa mutually constitutive elements of island writing. There is no progression in small town in New Zealand's North Island, at the border between land and which creolization represents the pinnacle of island articulation; rather, these sea. 100 In sum, the beach is an important space to reimagine the 'contact island texts surpass and complicate their interpretive frames. It's important to zone' between cultures - or the refusal ofcontact ifwe consider the way many note that the discourse of creolization does not 'travel' evenly across all island tourist resorts ban locals - and has been developed by other writers who have spaces nor does it represent all island histories, just as we must recognize that theorized creolization through other coastal symbols such as coral and the the popular mode of a diasporic postcolonialism has been perceived as threat­ mangrove. 101." ~-' ening to or oblivious to indigenous studies. It is by recognizing the compara­ While the beach is a compelling figure to exp1ate cross-cultural encounter, tive process of distortion and configuration 'that we might better understand Indian and Mrican diasporic writers have turned to the plantation to histori­ how literary works that inscribe, for instance, the sea as history might also be cize creolization. Fernando Ortiz theorized the concept of transculturation as simultaneously articulating a genealogy of creolization. In this case we might integral to the labour in Cuban sugar and tobacco fields, while Sidney Mintz interpret creolization as a mode of tracing history through ancestry and and Richard Price have turned to anglophone island plantations to develop memory. their theory of creolization, arguing against the 'cultural death' or tabula rasa Like other postcolonial literatures, island writing has turned to certain model of African diaspora cultures. Kamau Brathwaite's The Development of spaces to theorize the events of time. The chronotopes (compressions of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 turned to the plantation to theorize the time/space) discussed earlier include the sea, the ship and the landscape process of creolization between Europeans and Mricans, later building upon haunted by history, but we might also turn to contained spaces within the this to develop a theory of 'nation language', a cultural articulation that island such as the space of maronnage, the provision grounds, the port, the resulted specifically from the violence of forced labour and language. Unlike 99 master's house, the slave barracks, the prison, the market and other spaces. In models of multiculturalism promoted by global capitalism, these scholars these last few pages, I will briefly turn to two island tropes of cultural contact specifically theorized cultural production from subaltern histories of violence and creolization: the beach and the plantation. and cultural continuity. 102

822 823 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures The plantation novel has been associated with the creolization process in the the present moment and duration, the questioning ofliterary genres, the power islands of the Americas and has generally been understood in terms of the 10 of the baroque, the nonprojectile imaginary construct'.108 interaction between diverse groups of Europeans and Africans. 3 Yet it has Other models ofcreolization have turned to the history ofracial and political also been a significant trope of Indian diaspora writers such as J. S. Kanwal, filiation, particularly spaces that share a violent history ofslavery and indenture whose novel The Morning inscribes the recruitment from India, the crossing of in the sugar plantations. Fran<;oise Verges (Reunion) describes creolization as the kalapani, and the creolization of diverse\South Asians - across caste, region, 'an invention of everyday life, an aesthetics and a creative practice in a world language and gender lines - in their adopted lands of Fiji. Moreover the novel, dominated by brutality, domination, violence'. 109 She theorizes the discourse like its anti-indenture predecessor, Totaram Sanadhya's My Twenty-one Years in of anti-colonial revolution as an attempt to break with the colonial metropole the Fiji Islands and the Story of the Haunted Line (1914), inscribes an additional in a way that is entangled with a larger issue offiliation, a break which relieves layering of creolization through interactions with indigenous Fijians, which the colonized subject from a legacy of complicity and shame. In its place a were banned by the colonial administration.104 Although the novel does not colonial family romance is created in which the maternal parent becomes the depict interracial marriage between Indian and indigenous Fijian subjects, the colonial motherland (symbolizing cultural mores, liberty, rights), the colon­ novel, like Subramani's Fiji-Hindi novel Duaka Puraan (2001), reflects a cul­ ized become children, creating an ambivalent role for metissage. In Verges's tural and linguistic creolization that remains largely separate from the question view, the acceptance.of metissage is the acceptance of a genealogy of slavery, of racial inheritance, even as it queries modes of cultural and biological rape, violence, shame and complicity which undermines the popular narrative reproduction. 11o of postcolonial innocence. In her work, engagement with the history of The concept of creolization has been adopted for many cultural and political creolization means accountability for the past and for the future. expressions. It refers to language, linguistics, epistemology, cultural contact and Despite the discourse ofcolonialism, insularity does not preclude an engage- cultural violence, racial and ethnic inheritance, the brutal legacy of colonialism ment with creolization. As Chris Bongie writes: and a utopian model for future societies. In writing about francophone island cultures, Fran<;oise Lionnet has called for a way to 'bypass the ancient symme­ If insular thinking is at the heart of traditional identity politics, the relational tries and dichotomies ... of thought', and finds that'Metissage is such a concept politics that emerges out ofthe cross-culturalizing dynamics ofthe creoIization and a practice: it is the site ofundecidability and indeterminacy, where solidarity process puts this insularity into question ... We live in a hybridized world of transcultural, transnational relations in which every island (ethnicity, nation, becomes the fundamental principle of political action against hegemonic lan­ and the like) is but a fragment of the whole that is always already in the process guages.,105 Thus she reads Virahsawmy's play T01ifann as less a 'writing back' to oftransforming the particular into something other .Wan its (Original, essential) the past than a 'transcolonial' engagement with postcolonial works that address self 111 .. ~::;- the question of Creole power in the public sphere. Her reading ofcreolization's potential is decidedly hopeful: 'the way Tmifann brings together European and In an effort to keep pressing these methodological frames, to foreground their Non-European traditions and realities is preciselywhatmal(es the playa creative own comparative processes of distortion and configuration, I conclude by statement about the openness of Creole cultures to an infinite array of cultural turning to how the concept of creoleness itself often invokes a mutually transpositions' .106 Lionnet's emphasis on creolization's modes of language, constitutive space of non-creoleness, a binary relation that needs to be decon­ orality and alternative models of knowing can be seen in the work of Glissant, structed in order to destabilize the ways in which the discourse of authentic who .has argued that island geography (or archipelagraphy) helps destabilize origins often upholds a notion of cultural purity. Given that the origins of the colonial epistemologies of time and space. He writes, 'without necessarily infer­ concept of creolization arose from the Caribbean historical context, I leave these last cautionary words to Glissant: ring any advantage whatsoever to their situation, the reality of archipelagoes in the Caribbean or the Pacific provides a natural illustration of the thought CreoIization as an idea is not primarily the glorification of the composite 10 of Relation' . 7 'Poetics of Relation' are defined as 'the dialectics between nature of a people: indeed, no people has been spared the cross-cultural the oral and the written, the thought of multilingualism, the balance between process. The idea of creoIization demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorifY 'unique' origins that the race safeguards and prolongs. In

824 825 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures

Western tradition, genealogical descent guarantees racial exclusivity ... To assert 14- Ibid., p. 57· 15. Ibid., p. 61. On white imperial masculinity, see also Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct ... the cat- 2 Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies oj Conquest (Minneapolis: egory of'creolized' that is considered as halfWay between two 'pure' extremes. 11 University of Minnesota Press, 2007). See also Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (eds.), Islands in History and Representation (London: Routledge, 2003). 16. See Weaver-Hightower, Empire Island, pp. 170-204- Notes 17. See introduction to Margaret Paul Joseph, Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction (New York: Greenwood, 1992). 1. Regretfully I do not have the space to explore the literature of Sri Lanka, which 18. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard shares many similar themes. University Press, 1983), pp. 18-20,174. 2. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: 19. John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon: Literature, Culture, and University ofVirginia Press, 1989), p. 139· Identity (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 8. 3. Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities oj Post/Colonial Literature 20. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 18. (London: Methuen, 1986). 4. J. P. White, 'An interview with Derek Walcott', in William Baer (ed.), Conversations 21. On its revisions see Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds.), 'The Tempest' 6 with Derek Walcott (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 199 ), p. 159· . and its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Thieme, 5. Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey (Staten Island, NY: We Postcolonial Con-texts; Helen Tiffin, 'Post-colonial literatures and counter-discourse', Press, 1999), p. 44. This larger argument is explored in Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Kunapipi, 9.3 (1987), 17-34, and 'The empire writes back: The Tempest' at http:// Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: faculty.pittstate.edu/-knichols/coloniaI3a.html; Rob Nixon, 'Caribbean and University of Hawai'i Press, 2007). Mrican appropriations of The Tempest', Critical Inquiry 13·3 (1987), pp. 557-78; A. 6. On tourist construction in the Caribbean, see Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: James Arnold, 'Caliban, culture, and nation-building in the Caribbean', in Nadia Lie From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003); and Ian G. Strachan, Paradise and Theo D'haen (eds.), Constellation Caliban: Figurations oja Character (Amsterdam: and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 231-44- Vera M. Kutzinski, 'The cult of Cali ban: collaboration University of Virginia Press, 2002). On Pacific discourses of island tourism see and revisionism in contemporary Caribbean narrative', in A. James Arnold (ed.), A Teresia K. Teaiwa, 'bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans', in David L. Hanlon and History oj Literature in the Caribbean, vol. 3 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Geoffrey M. White (eds.), Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific (Lanham, MD: Benjamins, 1997), pp. 286-302. Rowrnan & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 91-112. For a comparative literary perspective, 22. See Lamming's essays in The Pleasures oJExile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960) and see Anthony Carrigan, postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture and Environment his novel Water with Berries (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972). On (London: Routledge, 2010). Lamming's engagement with Shakespeare see Supriya Nair, CalibanJs Curse: George 7. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots. Lamming and the Revisioning oj History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 8. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis 1996). See 'Caliban', in Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants; A New World Trilogy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), and 'Caliban's guarden', Wasqfiri, 16 8 The Place oJSugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 19 5); Richard H. (1992), 2-6. See Roberto Fernandez Retamai~\. Caliban and other Essays Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)~ and Nadia Lie, 'Countering Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Diana Loxley, 0 Caliban: Roberto Fernandez Retamar and the postcolonial debate', in Lie and Problematic Shores: The Literature oj Islands (New York: St Martin's Press, 199 ); D'haen (eds.), Constellation Caliban, pp. 245-70, and Derek Walcott, Collected Patrick V. Kirch, 'Introduction: the archeology of island societies', in Patrick Kirch Poems: 1948-84 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986). (ed.), Island Societies: ArcheologicalApproaches to Evolution and Traniformation (Cambridge 23. See Aime Cesaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: TCG Translations, University Press, 1986), pp. 1-5; Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent 2002) and Judith Holland Sarnecki, 'Mastering the masters: Aime Cesaire's creoliza­ 80 Land, Marquesas, 1774-1880 (Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 19 ). tion of Shakespeare's The Tempest', The French Review, 74-2 (2000), 276-86; 9. Kevin Carpenter, Desert Isles & Pirate Islands: The Island Theme in Nineteenth-Century Joan Dayan, 'Playing Caliban: Cesaire's Tempest', in Sarah Lawall (ed.), Reading English Juvenile Fiction: a SU11Jey and Bibliography (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, World Literature: Theory, History, Practice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 1984), p. 8. pp. 136-59. I adopt the term 'transcolonial' from Fran<.;oise Lionnet, 'Creole vernac­ 10. Nawal Muhammad Hassan, Hayy bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe (Baghdad: ular theatre: transcolonial translations in Mauritius', MLN, 118 (2003),911-32. AI-Rashid House, 1980). 24- See Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 139; Brathwaite, The Arrivants, p. 192. 11. See Samar Attar, The Vital Roots oj European Enlightenment: Ibn Tujayl's Difluence on 25. 'Caribbean readings of The Tempest', paper delivered at Toujann and other Tempests: Modern Western Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). See Loxley on the Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Contexts Conference, Birkbeck College/The Mrica Centre, way some colonial island narratives create a tabula rasa for a self-validating scientific Saturday, 11 December 1999. masculine subject, Problematic Shores, p. 48. 26. Pleasures oj Exile, p. 15; see also Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 130, Jonathan 12. Loxley, Problematic Shores, p. 37· Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 13. Ibid., p. 47·

826 827 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island writing, Creole cultures

2004), PJ}18-19 and their relation to both Mannoni and Fanon's interpretation of 44· Ibid., p. 11. colonial dependency. 45· Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination ojMatter, trans. 27. See Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (University of Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 1983), p. 6. Chicago Press, 2001), for Walcott's use of Cali ban as a figure. 46. DetekWalcott, Om eros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 231; Grace 28. On the question ofCali ban's purported desire for Miranda, see Lamming Pleasures of Nichols, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (London: Karnak House, 1983), p. 5. Exile, p. 102. 47· Albert Wendt, 'Pacific maps and fiction(s): a personal journey', in Suvendrini Perera 29. See Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 135; Peter Hulme, 'The profit oflanguage: (ed.),Asian andPacijicInscriptions (Bundoora, VIC: Meridian, 1995), pp. 13-43, at 13. George Lamming's Water with Berries', in Jonathan White, Recasting the World: 48. Epeli Hau'ofa, 'Our sea ofislands', in Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hau'ofa Literature After Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), pp. 38-52; (eds.),ANew Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea ojIslands (Suva, FJ: Beake House, 1993), Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean, pp. 20-30. On the homosocial logic of the pp. 2-16, at 7. Prospero-Caliban line of descent which excludes women, see Fernandez Retamar, 49· Epeli Hau'ofa, 'The ocean in us', Dreadlocks in Oceania, 1 (1997), 124-48. See Caliban and other Essays, its critique by Kutzinski, 'The cult of Caliban', and Margaret Jolly, 'On the edge? Deserts, oceans, islands', The Contemporary Pacijic, Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean, pp. 18-20. 13.2 (Fall 2001), 417-66, on the diversity of island topographies and why the 30. On the gendering of The Tempest rewrites see Chantal Zabus, Tempests qfter transoceanic is not applicable in all cases. Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Pal grave, 2002). 50. Tom Davis, Vaka: Saga oj a Polynesian Canoe (Auckland and Suva, FJ: Institute of 31. Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Random House, 1987), and Pacific Studies and Polynesian Press, 1992); Robert Sullivan, Star Waka (Auckland 'Caliban's daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot', Frontiers 12.1 (1991), 36-51; University Press, 1999); Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Searchingfor Nei Nim.Janoa (Suva, FJ: Judith Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields: Women.Js Writing and Creole Subjectivity Mana Publications, 1999). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 51. Albert Wendt, Inside Us the Dead (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1976), p. 7. 32. See David Dabydeen, Coolie Odyssey (London: Hansib, 1988). I include Guyanese 52. Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 1987), p. 5. writers in my model of island tidalectics due to the way in which they have engaged 53· Ibid., p. 26. with the transoceanic imaginary, plantation capitalism, and other histories that link 54- For more on oceanic literatures, see Paul Sharrad, 'Imagining the Pacific', Meanjin, this nation closely to the anglophone island Caribbean. 49·4 (Summer 1990), 597-606, and 'Pathways in the sea: a pelagic post­ 33. Sylvia Wynter, 'Beyond Miranda's meanings: un/silencing the "demonic ground" colonialism?', in Jean-Pierre Durix (ed.), Literary ArchiPelagoes (Universitaires de of Cali ban's woman', in Carol Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (eds.), Out ofthe Dijon, 1998), pp. 95-108; and DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots. Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton, NJ: Mrica World Press, 1990), 55· Teaiwa, Searchingfor Nei Nim.Janoa, p. ix. PP·355-72. 56. Albert Wendt, Ola (Auckland: Penguin, 1991), p. 35. 34. Kamau Brathwaite, X/Se!f(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). In Barabajan 57· Ibid., p. 76. Poems, Brathwaite includes 'Sycorax's Book' as a counterpart to 'Prospero's Book'. 58. Ibid., p. 124. See Elaine Savory, Wordsongs &wordwounds /homecoming: Kamau Brathwaite's 59· J. S. Kanwal, The Morning (Savera) (New Delhi: Diamond Publications, 1992); Barabajan Poems', World Literature Today, 68.4 (Autumn 1994),750-7, Satendra Nandan, Lines Across Black Waters (Adelaide: CRNLE, 1997), and 35. Tozifann: A Mauritian Fantasy, trans. Nisha and Michael Walling, ed. M. Banham, 'Migration, dispossession, exile and the diasporic Gonsciousness', in Ralph J. J. Gibbs and F. Osofisan, African Theatre: Playwrights and Politics (Oxford: James Crane and Radhika Mohanram (eds.), Shifting dbntinents/Colliding Cultures: Currey,1999), pp. 217-54; Fran~oise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Diaspora Writing ojthe Indian Subcontinent (Amsterdam:"Rodopi, 2000), pp. 35-54. Self-portraiture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Shawkat Toorawa, 'Strange 60. Nandan, Lines Across Black Waters, p. 9. bedfellows? Mauritian writers and Shakespeare', Wasajari, 30 (Autumn 1999),27-31. 61. Subramani, 'Gone Bush: A Novella', The Fantasy Eaters (Washington, DC: Three 36. Keri Hulme, The Bone People (1983; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 3. Continents Press, 1988), p. 77. 37. See Walcott, Collected Poems, p. 285. This argument is expanded in DeLoughrey, 62. Epeli Hau'ofa, 'The ocean in us', in Dreadlocks in Oceania, 1 (1997), 124-48, at 142. Routes and Roots. 63· This gendering is explored in DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, as well as 'Gendering 38. Edouard Glissant, Poetics ofRelation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of the voyage: trespassing the (black) Atlantic and Caribbean', in Thamyris: CaJibbean Michigan Press, 1997), p. 6. Women.Js Writing/Imagining Caribbean Space, 5.2(1998), 205-31. 39. Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! (London: Abacus, 1996), p. 27. 64· Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2003). 40. Ibid., p. 168. 65· Das in David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (eds.), India in the Caribbean (London: 41. Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Hansib, 1987), pp. 288-9. Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1974) p. 64; Edouard Glissant, 66. These texts have not been translated into English. See Veronique Bragard, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: Caraf Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures (London: Books/University ofVirginia, 1989), p. 67. Peter Lang, 2008). _ 42. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, pp. 33-4. 67· David Dabydeen, Coolie Odyssey (London: Hansib Publications, 1988). 43. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC: 68. Khal Torabully, 'The coolies' odyssey', UNESCO Courier (October 1996), Duke University Press, 1992), p. 4- pp. 13-16.

828 829 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY Island Writing, Creole cultures

69. Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology if the Indian Labour 98. Ato Qgayson, 'Postcolonial comparisons: methodologies', Modern Language Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002), p. 17. Association conference, San Francisco, 28 December 2008. 70. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 234. 99· See the 'American Tropics: towards a literary geography' project which is dedi­ 71. Marlene NourbeSe Philip, 'A piece ofland surrounded', Orion, 14.2 (1995), 41-7, cated to tracing out the relevance ofmany of these spaces to history and literature. at 41. www.essex.ac.uk/lifts/American_Tropics/index.htm. 72. Ibid., p. 44. See Ramabai Espinet'spoem 'An Ageable Woman', written as Sycorax 100. James George, Ocean Roads (Wellington: Huia Press, 2006). who claims the land through labour, not 'because I sell / Trade or use it / Or find it to 101. Torabully writes, 'In chOOSing the metaphor of coral to define coolitude, I wanted be / 'A lovely piece of real estate', in Espinet, Nuclear Seasons (Toronto: Sister Vision to underscore the symbolic importance of the "rock" for Cesaire, in the context of Press, 1991), p. 81. the struggle for the decolonization ofminds. It had to be forceful. The coral can be 73. Earl Lovelace, Salt (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 3. both soft, and hard, it can be found in two states, and it is traversed by currents, 74· Sam Selvon,An Island is a World (1955; Toronto: TSAR, 1993), p. 212. continuously open to new thoughts and systems. It is a living body with elements 75. Ibid., p. 211. which are both vulnerable and solid, it is a symbol of the fluidity of relationships 76. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 42. and influences', in Carter and TorabuIly, Coolitude, p. 152. On the mangrove 77. Selvon, An Island, p. 1. see Maryse Conde, Crossing the Mangrove, trans. R. Philcox (New York: 78. Naipaul, The Middle Passage, pp. 29, 27. Doubleday, 1995); Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, trans. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and 79· Walcott, Collected Poems, p. 256. Val Vinokurov (New York: Random House, 1997); and Richard and Sally Price, 80. Epeli Hau'ofa, Tales ifthe Tikongs (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1983), p. 69. 'Shadowboxing in the mangrove', CulturalAnthropology, 12.1 (1997),3-36. 81. Thomas Williams and James Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians (New York: D. Appleton and 102. Fernando Ortiz,_ Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis Co., 1860), p. 95. My thanks to Jolisa Gracewood for this reference. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Sidney W. Mintz and Richard 82. Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants~ (Port of Spain: The Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective College Press, 1981), p. 235. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976); Kamau Brathwaite, 83. Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster's Books, 1966), The Development qfCreole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, PP· 169-70 . 1971). There is a vast body of work on the topic but starting points might be 84· Selvon, An Island, p. 73. Benitez-Rojo, Repeating Island; Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (eds.), 85. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 63. OJ!,estioning Creole: Creolization Discourses in Caribbean Culture (Kingston, Jamaica: 86. Cliff, 'Caliban's daughter', p. 37. Ian Randle, 2002) and Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnes Sourieau (eds.), 87· Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 145. Caribbean Creolization: Riflections on the Cultural Dynamics qf Language, Literature, 88. Merle Collins, The Colour if Forgetting (London: Virago Women's Press, 1995), and Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). On francophone con­ p.164- cepts of creolite and metissage, see Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices; Jean Bernabe, 89. Celo Kulagoe, 'White Land', in Albert Wendt (ed.), Lali: A Pacific Anthology Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Bloge de la Creolite/In Praise if (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1980), p. 215. Creoleness, bilingual edition, trans. M. B. Taleb-Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); 90. Patricia Grace, Po tiki (London: The Women's Press, 1986), p. 39; discussed in more Fran~oise Verges, Monsters and Revolutionaries:" Colonial Family Romance and detail in Elizabeth DeLoughrey, 'The spiral temporality of Patricia Grace's Potiki', Metissage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, .~999). Ariel, 1.30 (1999), 59-83. 103. On the Caribbean plantation novel, see Benitez-Rojo, Repeating Island; Bongie, 91. Mayra Montero, In the Palm ifDarkness (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Jacques Islands and Exiles; Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature (London: Roumain, Masters if the Dew, trans. Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook Routledge, 2006); and Strachan, Paradise and Plantation. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1978). 104. Totaram Sanadhya, My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands and the Story qf the 92. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 11; Maximin, Lone Sun (Charlottesville: University Haunted Line, trans. and ed. J.D. Kelly and u.K. Singh (Suva: Fiji Museum, 1991). Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 10. 105. Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices, p. 6. On creolization in the Indian Ocean islands, 93. See Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renee K. Gosson and George B. Handley (eds.), see also Peter Hawkins, The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures Caribbean Literatu,re and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Charlottesville: and Cultures qfthe Francophone Indian Ocean (New York: Lexington Books, 7). University ofVirginia Press, 2005). 200 106. Lionnet, 'Creole vernacular theatre', pp. 917, 919. See also Fran~oise Lionnet, 94. Epeli Hau'ofa, 'Epilogue: pasts to remember', in R. Borofsky (ed.), Remembrance if 'Creolite in the Indian Ocean: two models of cultural diversity', Yale French Studies, Pacific Pasts (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000), pp. 459-60. 82 (1993), 101-12. 95. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics if Sovereignty and 107. Glissant, Poetics ifRelation, pp. 33-4. Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 108. Ibid., p. 35. 96. Wendt, 'Pacific maps and fiction(s)', p. 18; Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, 'L(o)osing the 1°9· Fran~oise Verges, 'Open session, cosmopolitanism, urban culture and creole iden­ edge', The Contemporary Pacific, 13.2 (Fall 2001), 344. tity in the twenty-first century', iIi Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.), Creolite and 97. See Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Creolization: Documenta 11 Platform 3 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, Hawai~i (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993). 2003), p. 180.

0 83 83 1 I,'

ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY

110. Verges, Monsters and Revolutionaries, p. 11. 111. Bongie, Islands and Exiles, p. 18. 112. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 140. See Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices, p. 4, which points out the translation of Glissant's

MARIANO SISKIND

As it is the case with most keywords, critical discussions of magical realism should not avoid asking questions about the history, geography and cultural politics of the concepts and practices at stake in such examinations. When was the concept of.magical realism articulated? Is magical realism a Latin American or a universal aesthetic form? And what is the cultural, historical and political relation of magical realism with the discourse of postcolonialism? Scholars are in general agreement about the facts, but often differ on how to interpret them. How can we make sense of the fact that the first critic to think about magical realism as an aesthetic category was a German art critic, Franz Roh (189°- 1965), and not the Latin Americans Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906-2001) and Alejo Carpentier (1904-60)? What does this transatlantic (pre)history of the concept of magical realism say about the particularist (peripheral, Third World, post­ colonial) claims or universalist inscriptions of this narrative form? Answers to these questions vary, but what seems to be missing in the vast bibliography on magical realism that started growing expo1}entially since the mid 1980s is a historical narrative of how magical realisnt:tvas transformed from a narrowly defined concept capable of explaining the scope of post-expressionist painting Franz Roh; to the aesthetic that was supposed to define the Latin American rulrural difference in Uslar Pietri and Carpentier, and later in Gabriel Garda Marquez (b. 1927); to finally come to be seen, as Romi Bhabha s'uggested, as

trhe literary language of the emergent postcolonial world'. 1 This chapter will trace the transcultural genealogy of a critical concept and aesthetic form through its various articulations prior to its becoming the highly celebrated postcolonial form we know today. The explicit coupling of magical realism and postcolonial discourse is a rather recent development. Almost at the same time as Bhabha's acknowledg­ ment of magical realism as the narrative form most capable of expressing the cu]rural particularity of the postcolonial periphery in 1990, Gayatri Spivak had I suggested the need to reflect upon the trajectory of magical realism, from its

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